Reading in the Margins

On March 19th, the Caxton Club of Chicago—a bibliophilic society of authors, binders, collectors, conservators, dealers, designers, editors, librarians, publishers, and scholars—will host a symposium at the Newberry Library devoted to the question of “other people’s books.” Under discussion will be what are known as “association copies”—those books that have been written in or marked upon by interesting or famous people. Presenters will discuss stars of marginalia such as John Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats, as well as unknown readers whose annotations are of scholarly interest.

In literary terms, this question of “association” is compelling: the jottings with which generations of notable readers have defaced the pages of their books—perhaps thereby incurring the wrath of generations of librarians—draw us into a reader’s private conversation with their books. They also do much to illuminate the way books function in our lives. From a presentation copy inscribed by T.S. Eliot to his sister on the day of its publication to an anthology of Hemingway’s inscribed to his boxing coach (later a pallbearer at the author’s funeral), association books have yet another layer of cultural value: that of social objects.

The Caxton Club symposium coincides with the release of an essay collection, “Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell.” The essays trace the stories of fifty-two different books from one owner to the next, creating a narrative around each—as DeLillo did with the baseball in “Underworld”—bringing to life the community of characters that surrounds it. My favorite example: in a copy of Ben Hecht’s “A Child of the Century,” his wife, Rose Caylor, had drawn an arrow pointing to a place where the page had been burnt. “Strikes matches on books,” she wrote below. Hecht, it seemed, liked to smoke while reading.